Higher Criticism in the Free Church fathers

“Higher Criticism” in the
Free Church Fathers

RICHARD A. RIESEN, M.A., B.D.

At the outset of a case now nearly forgotten but once hotly
debated, George Adam Smith, Professor of Old Testament at the
Free Church College, Glasgow, gave ill-considered vent to an ill-
phrased conviction: “We may say that Modern Criticism has won
its war against the Traditional Theories. It only remains to fix the
amount of the indemnity”. Though Smith, author of better things,
went on to become principal of Aberdeen University, knight,
moderator of his church’s assembly and a royal chaplain in
Scotland, his remark, “a strangely infelicitous one for so brilliant a
writer”, as Carnegie Simpson called it, served only to aggravate the
opposition to him caused by the book in which it appeared,
Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, the
Lyman Beecher Lectures he had delivered at Yale in 1899.
However, on a motion by Robert Rainy, seconded by James Orr, a
process against Smith was declined by a substantial majority
(534-263) in the General Assembly of 1902, thus foreclosing the
possibility that a critical approach to Holy Scripture would ever
again be matter for a heresy trial in a Scottish Church. 1 Inasmuch
as his proved to be the last impeachment of its kind, Smith’s
judgement, though not calculated to endear, was nonetheless
correct.

More interesting, if not more important, is the fact that Smith
was a Free Churchman. So indeed was every other hero-heretic who
led in the revolution in biblical studies in Scotland in the last half of
the nineteenth century— Marcus Dods, A. B. Bruce, and, most
famous and most brilliant of them all, William Robertson Smith.
Though never impeached, A. B. Davidson should also be counted
in their number. Assistant and immediate successor to the fabled
‘Rabbi” Duncan, he was tutor to both Smiths and along with them
a member of “that great Scottish triad in biblical studies”, as S. A.
Cook of Cambridge called them, “who mark an epoch in this field
of research by their ability to carry their contemporaries with them
over the gulf that severs earlier ‘pre-critical’ Old Testament studies
and the attitudes and spirit that subsequently came to prevail”. 2 To
the delight of some and the horror of not a few, the church of the
Disruption seemed to have nurtured not only the most capable and

1 Simpson has summarized the George Adam Smith case in The Life of Principal
Rainy (London, 1909), ii, 269ff.

2 S. A. Cook, The Expository Times, vol. liv., 33.

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most influential, but the most critical, of Scotland’s biblical
scholars.

Opinions differ as to the merits or otherwise of the change in
attitudes to the Bible which thus took place. Those who in general
approve of it will agree with J. R. Fleming that — along with the
concomitant change in attitudes to the Westminster Confession— it
led to “an activity of thought, study, and speculation never before
known in the religious history of Scotland”; 3 and 1981, the
centenary of Robertson Smith’s removal from his chair at
Aberdeen, will no doubt bring its share of articles on Smith’s
contribution as Semitic scholar, anthropologist, philologist, and
martyr for academic freedom. Those who disapprove will echo
Stewart and Cameron who, writing in 1910 in vindication of the
continuing Free Church, declared that “the man was got out of the
way, but the opinions of which he was the advocate remained. . . .
The heresies of Robertson Smith . . . are the orthodoxies of the men
who are his successors in Scotland today”. 4 But however one
assesses the long-term effects of the change there is general
agreement on its significance, particularly in view of the fact that it
took place, in less than half a century, within the colleges of the
church once led by Chalmers, Cunningham and Candlish.

The question, now familiar, is why? Why did the church which
prided itself on being the strictest evangelical body in Christendom
seem to go further than any other in setting forth revolutionary
conceptions of the Bible? 5

The thesis of this paper is that the responsibility may partly lie
with the Free Church Fathers themselves, not only because they
provided the hard doctrine for their successors to react to, but
because in their defence of the traditional theories they sometimes
asked “critical” questions and gave “critical” answers or, what
often has the same effect, gave inadequate answers or none at all,
thus perhaps accelerating the very process they intended to arrest.

There can be little doubt about where the men of 1843, the
founders of New College, stood on the question of Scripture.
William Cunningham, Robert Candlish, and James Bannerman, to
name only three of the Free Church’s best apologists, staunchly
defended what they believed to be the position of the Reformers
and, perhaps especially, of the Westminster Confession. “The
authority of the holy scripture”, says section IV, chapter I of the

3 J. R. Fleming, The Church in Scotland, 1875-1929 (Edinburgh, 1933), 226.

4 Alexander Stewart and J. Kennedy Cameron, The Free Church of Scotland,
1843-1910 (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1910), 63.

5 Fleming, The Church in Scotland, 1875-1929, 9. Simpson also poses the question
in The Life of Principal Rainy, i, 307. It is taken for granted that the answer in
the most general terms is “because it was the Evangelicals who tended to take the
Bible and questions concerning the Bible most seriously.” But such an answer
only underlines the irony of the situation.

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Standards, “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or
church, but wholly upon God, the author thereof; and therefore it
is to be received, because it is the word of God ; and section VIII
declares that “The Old Testament in Hebrew ... and the New
Testament in Greek . . . being immediately inspired by God, and by
his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore
authentical; so as in all controversies of religion, the Church is
finally to appeal unto them’’.

Although the view of Scripture outlined in the Confession
might well serve as a statement of what the Disruption Fathers were
defending, it has recently been maintained that they probably had
less in common with Calvin or the Westminster Divines than with
Robert Haldane the Congregationalist, Baptist, protagonist in the
Apocrypha Controversy and “Founding Father of Fundamentalism
in Scotland ”. 6

Haldane’s position was precise and unequivocal: “the

inspiration to which the Scriptures lay claim”, he said, “is in the
fullest sense plenary in every part of them, extending both to the
ideas, and to the words in which these ideas are expressed ”. 7
Cunningham, who frequently cited Haldane, was of a like mind:
“The Holy Spirit not merely superintended the writers so as to
preserve them from error”, he declared, “but suggested to them
the words in which the matter He communicated to them was to be
conveyed ”. 8 Candlish, only slightly less precise, claimed essentially
the same thing (“What they say, or write under this guidance, is as
truly said and written by God, through them, as if their
instrumentally were not used at all. God is in the fullest sense
responsible for every word of it .”) 9 and Bannerman, whose
lengthy volume is an exhaustive if not always lucid treatment of the
subject, said of the Scriptures, “In the first place, they contain a
communication of truth from God supernaturally given to man;
and in the second place, they contain that truth supernaturally
transferred to human language, and therefore free from all mixture
or addition or error ”. 1 0 This may be taken as the traditional view.

6 Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland,
1843-1874 (Edinburgh, 1975), 251-253.

7 Robert Haldane, The Authenticity and Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures
Considered; in Opposition to the Erroneous Opinions that are Circulated on the
Subject (Edinburgh, 1827), 16.

8 William Cunningham, Theological Lectures on Subjects Connected with Natural
Theology, Evidences of Christianity, The Canon and Inspiration of Scripture
(London, 1878), 346.

9 R. S. Candlish, Reason and Revelation (London, 1860), 23. Reason and
Revelation is a collection. Its first two chapters “The Authority and Inspiration
of the Holy Scriptures” and “The Infallibility of Holy Scripture” were
delivered as lectures under the same titles in 1851 and 1857 respectively and both
are available in pamphlet form.

10 James Bannerman, Inspiration: The Infallible Truth and Divine Authority of the
Holy Scriptures (Edinburgh, 1865), 149-150.

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The traditionalists’ concern to make clear what their doctrine of
inspiration was was balanced by a concern to make clear what it
was not. It was not, for one thing, a theory of how the Scriptures
were inspired. Candlish spoke for them all when he said: “The fact
of inspiration may be proved by Divine testimony, and accepted as
an ascertained article of belief, while the manner of it may be
neither revealed from heaven, nor within the range of discovery
upon earth”. 11 It was not, for another thing, a theory which
eliminated the human element in Scripture. All agreed that the
Bible, inspired even in the language it employs, is nonetheless the
creation of men, marked, as Bannerman put it, “by the human
individuality that distinguishes the writing of any man who thinks
and writes with freedom and earnestness in his own character and
without any disguise”. 1 2 Talk of mechanical dictation on the one
hand or degrees of inspiration on the other made up no part of their
case. They explicitly repudiated both, thus opposing those who
made too little of human authorship as well as those who made too
much of it. 1 3 Their doctrine was neither more nor less than that the
Bible is patently but inexplicably both human and divine.

Such was the theory that all of its defenders referred to as the
doctrine of plenary inspiration: Haldane called it verbal or plenary
inspiration, using the terms interchangeably, and Cunningham,
more dogmatically, maintained that “in fairness the word plenary
should be reserved for the view which asserts the entire verbal
inspiration”. 1 4

The conspicuously careful language, absent even from the
Confession of Faith, can best be appreciated in light of the
opponents against which it was directed. By 1850, the fathers felt,
the word inspiration had been so abused that it could no longer be
assumed that it meant what it had always meant; it could no longer
be left unattended by qualifying adjectives. Candlish even had
second thoughts about the word inspiration itself.

“I intend, indeed, [he said] rather to avoid the use of this
word inspiration; not because I consider it unsuitable— it is
the right word — but because it has been, I fear I must say
disingenuously, perverted from its recognized meaning, as
expressive of that divine superintendence of the process of
revelation which secures infallibly the truth and accuracy of

11 Candlish, Reason and Revelation, 22.

12 Bannerman, Inspiration, 418.

13 The potentially awkward relationship between the traditionalists and some of the
esteemed older writers who may have slipped into “one-sided and extreme
modes of expression” in discussing inspiration is illustrated by Andrew
Crichton’s comments on John Owen, in “The Purpose and Form of Holy
Scripture”, Christianity and Recent Speculation: Six Lectures by Ministers of
the Free Church, with a preface by Robert S. Candlish (Edinburgh, 1866), 1 16.

14 Cunningham, Lectures, 345.

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what is revealed, and made to signify the mere elevation,
more or less, of human, and therefore fallible, capacity or
faculty ”. 15

As Candlish’s remarks indicate, the main enemy was not the out
and out attackers of Scripture. It was those — Lowth and
Dodderidge, for example, in the eighteenth century and Hill, Pye
Smith and Henderson in the nineteenth — who, while professing to
be the Bible’s defenders, effectually undermined its authority,
either by holding that the Bible is inspired, but only in part, or by
claiming that its inspiration is the inspiration of the writers rather
than of the writings, “the quickening of spiritual thought and
feeling from within”, as Bannerman described it, “not the
presentation of supernatural truth from without. ...” 1 6 In a word
what the defenders of .the older view opposed was subjectivism, in
particular that form of subjectivism which found expression in
theories of partial inspiration. It was not the later and full-blown
criticism of Graf and Wellhausen, cold and clinical, everywhere
laying laboratory hands on Moses and Isaiah, that drew their fire.
It was almost the opposite. It was the spirit of Coleridge and
Schleiermacher, “spiritual” or pietistic, pretending to a fuller
understanding of Scripture while it substituted experience for truth.

The older school, indeed, considered themselves the upholders,
not only of the right doctrine of inspiration, but of doctrine in
general. They resisted any attempt to ground Christianity in “blind
feelings”. Christian belief, for them, had to do with the
comprehension of truths, not with intuition or what Candlish
described as “a subtle sort of refined mysticism.” Theirs was a
theology of cognition: they were, in a sense, as rational as the
rationalists . 1 7

The irony is that in the battle for the Bible it may have been
precisely the rational character of orthodoxy which forced it to
open up gaps in the line which it could neither anticipate nor close.
As it attempted to defend itself — for apologetic is inextricably
bound up with dogmatic religion — it also exposed itself, preparing
if not encouraging, the counter-attack. Any general survey of the
defences of Scripture by the early Free Church divines will plainly
show what they were up to: they intended simply to expound and
thereby safeguard what one review of Bannerman’s book called
“the more rigid doctrine of inspiration ”. 18 A closer look will

15 R. S. Candlish, Reason and Revelation, 54.

16 Bannerman, Inspiration, 142.

17 P ut , of . coul ' se neither are some kinds of rationalism incompatible with some
kinds of subjectivism. Schleiermacher was perhaps the leading proponent of an
essentially ann-rational subjectivism which in its approach to Scripture was

rationalistic . For a useful comment on this see John Baillie, The idea of
Revelation in Recent Thought (London, 1956), 10-15.

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C

reveal, however, not only a surprising variety of opinion on issues
of fundamental importance, but also more than might be expected
of the kind of argument that is either critical in itself or tends to
invite critical analysis. A few illustrations will have to suffice to
make the point.

Candlish: Specific Texts, Issues and Difficulties

Candlish’s commentary on Genesis is an especially good
illustration of how difficult it is to guard the treasures of antiquity
that they be not lost, as Rabbi Duncan admonished, without being,
in his words, “bigotedly conservative— i.e. blind to progressive
light”. 19 The commentary was first published in 1843 in three
volumes. It was revised and issued again in two volumes in 1868
under a slightly different title. A third edition, essentially the same
as the second, was offered in one volume in 1884. The differences
between the editions, especially between the first and second,
though slight, reflect somewhat the changing attitudes in biblical
scholarship, albeit less of the changes in science than one might
expect, considering that Origin of Species as well as Essays and
Reviews had created its sensation in the interim. Toward scientific
and biblical scholarship there is mixed feeling on Candlish’s part.
Both, the commentary suggests, he might heartily endorse, if
somehow he could be persuaded that they were completely
trustworthy.

The object of the first two chapters of Genesis, Candlish
maintained in all the editions including the first, is not scientific but
religious. “Hence it was to be expected that, while nothing
contained in it could ever be found really and in the long run to
contradict science”, he said, “the gradual progress of discovery
might give occasion for apparent temporary contradictions. The
current interpretation of the Divine record, in such matters, will
naturally, and indeed, must necessarily, accommodate itself to the
actual state of scientific knowledge and opinion at the time.” 30
The essential facts of the account, he claimed, are the recent date
assigned to the existence of man on the earth, the previous
preparation of the earth for his habitation, the gradual nature of
the work of creation and the distinction and succession of days
during its progress. These, he affirmed, cannot be impugned by any
scientific discoveries — Darwin notwithstanding. At the same time,
he suggested, a very long history may have preceded that given in
Genesis. “What countless generations of living organisms may

18 The Bibliotheca Sacra, vol., xxii. (Andover, 1865), 352.

19 William Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica: Notes of Conversations with John
Duncan (Edinburgh, 1879), 9.

20 R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis Expounded in a Series of Discourses,
2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1868), i, 19.

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have teemed in the chaotic waters or brooded over the dark abyss”,
he said, “it is not within the scope of the inspiring Spirit to tell.
There is room and space for whole volumes of such matter before
the Holy Ghost takes up the record”. 2 1

The themes which dominate Candlish’s discussion of the
creation narrative are that it is a figurative account and that it is
therefore a partial account, the full meaning of which will be
revealed only when the times of the restitution of all things have
arrived. “The exact literal sense of much that is now obscure or
doubtful”, he averred, “as well as the bearing and importance of
what may seem insignificant or irrelevant, will then clearly
appear.” 2 2

Candlish’s emphasis on “the moral and spiritual aspect of this
sacred narrative” is conspicuous. He took it as a description of the
original relation of man to his Maker and a figurative
representation of his restoration from moral chaos to spiritual
beauty. 23 One of his major concerns was to restore to the story
something of what he considered its essential character. “This
divine record of creation”, he judged, “remarkable for the most
perfect simplicity, has been sadly complicated and embarrassed by
the human theories and speculations with which it has unhappily
become entangled.” 2 4

Clearly Candlish did not regard Genesis 1 and 2 as primarily
scientific or historical. Yet in no sense was he denying the
inspiration of the Scriptures by saying so. On the contrary, he was
attempting to safeguard it by putting it out of the range of critical
attack altogether; for if Genesis was not intended to be history or
science then it is not liable to the charge that it contradicts the
evidence of historical or scientific investigation — an approach,
incidentally, which is very like the modern one. 25 In the prefatory
note to the 1843 edition, Candlish expressed the hope that “by the
blessing of God, the tendency of what follows is not to raise
speculative questions, but to cherish a spiritual and practical frame

21 ibid.

22 Ibid., 20.

23 Ibid., 19.

24 Ibid . , 18.

25 Marcus Dods, accused in 1890 of subverting the doctrine of inspiration, wrote a
commentary which in some ways is strikingly like Candlish’s and in it said of the
compiler of Genesis: “He does describe the process of creation, but he describes
it only for the sake of the ideas regarding man’s relation to God and God’s
relation to the world which he can thereby convey. Indeed what we mean by
scientific knowledge was not in all the thoughts of the people for whom the book
was written. The subject of creation, of the beginning of man upon earth was
not approached from that side at all; and if we are to understand what is here
written we must burst the trammels of our own modes of thought and read these
chapters not as a chronological, astronomical, geological, biological statement
but as a moral or spiritual conception”. The Book of Genesis (London, 1889)!

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of mind, in the devout study of the Word of the living God”. 2 6 He
wanted to steer clear of any confrontation with allegedly hostile
science, no doubt because he thought it unnecessary or
unprofitable or unjustified.

Candlish may or may not have successfully avoided a conflict
with science. He found it much more difficult to avoid a conflict
with biblical criticism. In the revision of 1868, in an appendix
“some may think might perhaps be more properly placed as a
preface or introduction”, Candlish evidently felt himself obligated
to remark on current trends. Moses, it seemed to him, had fared
very much as Homer had fared: Genesis and the Iliad had both
been torn to shreds and “parcelled out among a motley and
miscellaneous crowd of unknown documents and imaginary
authors”. 27 Candlish saw multi-author theories as “an appeal
from word-catching and hair-splitting analysis” and gave his own
judgement that Genesis had “the stamp and impress of an
undivided authorship”. 2 8 At the same time, he urged that his view
was not inconsistent with there being many traces in Genesis, both
of earlier documents or traditions, and of later editions and
revisions. From the very nature of the case, he argued, it must be
so: it would be absurd to suppose that learned and inspired authors
would not take advantage of the material, legendary, lyrical, and
monumental, at their disposal. 29 Candlish therefore agreed with
the critics, but only to a point: there is evidence in Genesis of
“source material” — common sense would tell us that there might
be — but a documentary hypothesis in anything like its more
advanced formulations had overtones which were for him quite
unacceptable.

Candlish’s handling of Genesis nicely illustrates the problem
posed for those defending the traditional view of Scripture, the
problem namely, that it could not be defended apart from a
discussion of difficulties for which the solutions being offered were
considered inadequate or destructive and yet for which the
defenders themselves, because they had not faced them before, had
no perfect answers either. Those who took a softer line on
inspiration managed to avoid such dilemmas. They relied more on
experience and less on doctrine. Their style of piety decreased the
urgency to give right answers to theological questions and increased
their freedom to criticise the Bible.’" In that sense it was,

26 R. S. Candlish, Exposition of the Book of Genesis, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1843),
vol., i, p. iv.

27 R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis Expounded in a Series of Discourses, ii,
349.

28 Ibid., 350.

29 Ibid., 350-351.

30 See for instance Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection and Confessions of
an Inquiring Spirit (London. 1893), 333ff.

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legitimately, a way out of the difficulties and no doubt attractive
partly for that reason. But their subjectivism is what Candlish and
the others opposed in defence of an objective word of God.

Nonetheless there are hints here and there that Candlish
himself, thoroughly rational as he was, may have been guided from
time to time, even in argument, by something as close to feeling as
it was to reason . 31 An example is his discussion of the self-
evidencing inspiration of the Bible. “To a mind rightly exercised
upon them”, he said, “and above all, to a heart influenced by the
same Holy Spirit who breathes in them, the Scriptures evidence
themselves to be of divine authority and divine inspiration ”. 3 2 As
any son simply knows that a letter is from his father, Candlish
urged, so the child of God feels the divine impress of Scripture. It
breathes all through, even in the geneologies of Matthew and Luke
and “the dry catalogue of names in the tenth chapter of
Nehemiah ”. 3 3

“My own actual hand-writing may not be on the page:
sickness, or some casualty, may have made an amanuensis
necessary. But my boy knows my letter nevertheless— knows
it as all my own— knows it by the instinct, the intuition of
affection, and needs no other proof ”. 34

To his “cold, cynical, hypercritical schoolmates” who might
question what he sees of his father in “that barren itinerary with
which the letter begins— the dry list of places he tells you he has
gone through; or in that matter-of-course message about a cloak
and some books with which it ends”, the boy would reply:

“You may be too knowing to sympathize with me, ... but
there is enough in every line here to make me know my
father’s voice; and if he has been at pains to write down for
my satisfaction the names of towns and cities and men — if he
does give me simple notices about common things, I see
nothing strange in that. I love him all the better for his

31 According to Robert Rainy, Candlish was a “remarkable dialection” with an

aptitude for dogma, and more particularly for dogmatic precision.” On the
matter of inspiration however: “He manifested clearly enough a distaste about
minutiae . . . but he did so in the interest of a high view of inspiration. He felt
himself sitting at the feet of a divine informant, and listening to a divine voice
Ihe tracts somewhat occasional in their character, which he issued on this
SU u bJ t Ct ’ a . V 1 , ! l for their object to clear away misunderstandings or perplexities
which might hmder others from doing the same.” In Rainy’s chapter on

Snhn h r„ a h ' I?!'" William Wilson, Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish
(tclin burgh 1880), 604. Rainy s own views are set out in his The Bible and
Criticism (London, 1878).

32 R. S. Candlish, Reason and Revelation 40

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid . , 41.

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kindness and condescension; and whatever you may
insinuate, I will believe that this is all throughout his very
letter, and that he has a gracious meaning in all that he writes
to me in it, however frivolous it may seem to you ”. 35

It is the language of genuine devotion and it rings true, but it is
hardly an argument of the sort that Candlish ordinarily professes to
require. Moreover— and this is the point— it is precisely the sort of
argument that Candlish generally opposes . 36 The exact phrases in
fact — instinct and intuition— which he condemns elsewhere, he
approves here. It is true that what Candlish condemns is inspiration
regarded as intuition and what he approves is inspiration
recognized by intuition and that the two things must not be
confused; nevertheless, even his use of such language seems
somehow inconsistent. The Bible, Candlish argued, must never be
thought of as the product merely of heightened instinctive or
intuitional powers. And yet, how do we know it to be the word of
God?— “by the instinct, the intuition of affirmation” Candlish
answered, and we need no other proof. There is in Candlish more
of mixed feeling, if not theological ambiguity, than perhaps he was
aware of, which only serves to underline the complicated nature of
the case and the state of the argument at the time.

Candlish’s use of imagination, persuasive as rhetoric but not
convincing as argument, is illustrated in his defence of the lack of
uniformity between the gospel narratives, a problem often alluded
to by opponents of full inspiration. His argument consists in a
supposition. Suppose, Candlish suggested, that Christ, during His
lifetime or after His resurrection, wanted four of His followers to
write down, separately and independently, what they remembered
of His sayings and doings and then to bring their several accounts
to Him for revision and correction. The knowledge that what they
wrote was to be submitted to their Master’s eye, Candlish
contended, would be a stimulus to all of them to do their best; it
would also give them boldness and freedom in executing their task.
In other words, the assurance that Christ would be editing their

35 Ibid., 41-42. On almost every important issue Candlish and Coleridge were
opposed, but on this they voice a similar sentiment. “If in the holy men thus
actuated [by the Holy Spirit] all imperfection of knowledge, all participation in
the mistakes and limits of their several ages had been excluded’’, Coleridge said,
“how could these Writings be or become the history and example, the echo and
more lustrous image of the work and warfare of the sanctifying Principle in
us? — If after all this, and in spite of all this, some captious litigator should lay
hold of a text here or there — St Paul’s cloak left at Troas with Carpus, or a verse
from the Canticles, and ask: ‘Of what spiritual use is this?’ — the answer is
ready: — It proves to us that nothing can be so trifling as not to supply an evil
heart with a pretext for unbelief”. Aids to Reflection and Confessions of an
Inquiring Spirit, 336-337.

36 See especially Reason and Revelation, 16ff.

I

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work, rather than hamper them, would release them from the fear
of not giving verbatim every sentence of a discourse, or not stating
every particular about a miracle; furthermore, they would not be
bothered about apparent differences between their accounts. Each
would follow his own bent and there would be “a free play and
exercise of their faculties and feelings ”. 37

And what will Christ do with the four manuscripts submitted to
Him? Will He retrench here and enlarge there, cut, alter and
amend? He will not, Candlish maintained.

“He will leave the memoirs in the freedom and freshness of
their original spontaneous simplicity; only taking care that
there is nothing in them for which he would not be willing to
stand voucher. He prefers their easy and artless reminiscence
to an absolutely perfect history, as giving really a truer and
more life-like representation of himself. He suffers them to
go forth under his sanction, although he quite well foresees
that the different ways in which they tell the story of his life
may give rise to questions that could only be solved by a fuller
and more exact narrative than any one of all the four
professes to be ”. 3 8

Candlish may very well be right, but what are the implications
of this kind of argument for his case over-all? Even if easy and
artless reminiscences do give, in some sense, a truer representation
than absolutely perfect history, where does Candlish’s saying so
leave his doctrine of inspiration? He has practically invited attacks
on the historicity of the Gospels— or at least on the necessity of
historical accuracy in them . 39

Here, as with Genesis, Candlish was facing what Cunningham
referred to as “the one grand difficulty” attaching to the subject of
inspiration, indeed to all theological speculation, “the difficulty,
viz., of explaining how it is that God and men are combined or
united, as in some sense they are, in the productions of man’s
actions ”. 40 That he did not solve it is no condemnation, only a
forceful reminder of how exasperatingly elusive solutions to it are.

Cunningham: Words

Cunningham had not solved it either, as at least one of the

37 Ibid., 78.

38 Ibid., 79.

39 There is an affinity between Candlish and Marcus Dods on this issue as well.
Although it is impossible to claim that everything recorded in the Gospels
happened precisely as related, Dods maintained, still there is no doubt that “the
Gospefs present us with a lifelike portrait of Christ and with so accurate a report
of His words that we can form a true estimate of His teaching”. The Bible • Its
Origin and Nature (Edinburgh, 1905), 209-210.

40 Cunningham, Lectures, 403.

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reviews of his Lectures found it fairly easy to show . 41 More
important, however, is the overall character of his approach to
Scripture. While he was in one sense the most “critical” of all the
apologists, he was at the same time the most opposed to critical
scholarship.

Cunningham emphasised the verbal nature of inspiration. His
frequent use of the complete phrase “verbal plenary inspiration” is
conspicuous and distinguishes him from his allies. “God has given
us no certain means of knowing his will but from his word”, he
declared, “and no certain means of knowing the meaning of his
word, but from an investigation of the actual statements which it
contains”. 4 : Whatever else we may do in preparing to expound the
Scriptures we must always come back to the actual words of
Scripture: “There is nothing above or beyond them, there is
nothing beside or apart from them, that conveys to us authentically
or authoritatively the will of God for our salvation. The written
word must be at once our starting-point and our goal .” 43

The Scriptures have but one sense, Cunningham maintained,
and that one sense can be discovered only by investigating the
literal and grammatical meaning of Scripture’s words exactly as
they stand . 44 He therefore authorized the grammatical-historical
method — as long as by it was meant that “the statements of
Scripture are to be interpreted according to the ordinary rules of
philology and grammar; and that the actual meaning of the
vocables, and the actual import of the phrases and constructions
occurring in the books of Scripture, are to be ascertained by
testimony as matters of historical fact ”. 45

The caveat is significant, for Cunningham, like Candlish, was
caught between recommending a technique, even a modern
technique, and protesting against the use to which he felt it was
being put. While he approved in general of handling Scripture
according to its “historical sense”, he warned that the phrase was
often used by German writers to indicate a principle which
undermined the authority of Scripture, the principle namely, that it

41 The liberal American journal Bibliotheca Sacra, which regarded the volume as
“a specimen of the theological methods which were sanctioned by the Free
Church during the first year of its existence”, pointed out that Cunningham’s
claim that the actual words of Scripture were inspired as much as its message was
modified somewhat by his claim that “every portion of God’s word is also in
some sense man’s word, as it has all passed through some man’s mind, and been
brought in some way into contact with his faculties and with his faculties in
exercise”. The Bibliotheca Sacra, vol., xxxi. (Andover, 1878), 783-787. See
Lectures, 374. It is interesting too that of all the topics Cunningham discusses in
his Lectures, Bibliotheca Sacra select his treatment of inspiration as an
illustration of “Dr Cunningham’s general habit of reasoning”.

42 Cunningham, Lectures, 582.

43 Ibid.

is not the meaning of the discourses of Christ as we have them that
is to be sought, but the meaning His hearers were likely to attach to
them. On that doubtful principle, Cunningham went on, the
Germans then try to find out historically, “though with very scanty
evidence, for none are more credulous than infidels”, what were
the prevalent notions on the subjects spoken of and make these, or
their own impressions regarding them, and not the grammatical
meaning of the words, the standard of interpretation . 4 6

Cunningham’s practice was altogether consistent with his
theory: the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Scripture dictated
the closest possible scrutiny of every word of Scripture, and
nothing less than “a deliberate and persevering investigation of the
appropriate evidence according to distinct and well-established
rules” would do. His method was not far removed from that of the
critics. He differed from them only in his assumptions and
therefore in his conclusions.

The continuity and the discontinuity between Cunningham’s
and later views may be seen by comparing Cunningham’s with
remarks made by William Robertson Smith in a lecture delivered at
the opening of the Free Church College in Aberdeen.

“The higher criticism does not mean negative criticism [Smith
maintained]. It means the fair and honest looking at the Bible
as a historical record, and the effort everywhere to reach the
real meaning and historical setting, not of individual passages
of the Scripture, but of the Scripture Records as a whole; and
to do this we must apply the same principle that the
Reformation applied to detailed Exegesis. We must let the
Bible speak for itself. Our notions of the origin, the purpose,
the character of the Scripture books must be drawn, not from
vain traditions, but from a historical study of the books
themselves. This process can be dangerous to faith only when
it is begun without faith— when we forget that the Bible
history is no profane history, but the story of God’s saving
self-manifestation ”. 4 7

Both Cunningham and Smith wanted detailed exegesis as the
method of reaching the real meaning, not of isolated passages, but
of the Bible as a whole, and both insisted that any approach to
Scripture would be dangerous if it was not made as to the word of
God. What divided them was that what constituted isolating a
passage for Smith was taking it out of its historical context while
what constituted isolating a passage for Cunningham was taking it
out of its theological context. For Smith, the Bible was “the

46 Ibid., 588-589.

47 ^dir^rgh^h^S^O) 11 29O0 1 ’ “ WhaI Hist ° ry Teaches us to Seek in ‘he Bible”.

131

story of God’s saving self-manifestation”; for Cunningham “It
was one great leading design of God, in inspiring and communi-
cating his word, to make known to men some great fundamental
views of doctrine and duty ”. 48 The difference is between God
revealing Himself in His acts and God revealing His will in His
declarations. It might be argued that the differences between
Cunningham and Smith in their approach to the Bible would be
negligible if the difference in their view of the Bible was not
enormous.

It is only a little surprising, therefore, that Cunningham had
misgivings about “lower” criticism as well as “higher” criticism.
The mere settlement of the text, “the decision of all questions
about the reading for the purpose of exhibiting the sacred text as
nearly as possible as it came from the hands of its original
authors”, as he described the “lower”, was for him important, but
only insofar as it paved the way for interpretation. What mattered
was “the investigation of the sense and meaning” of Scripture’s
statements, that is, hermeneutics or exegesis . 49 His belief that
every word of Scripture had been given by God should not be
taken, then, as an ultimate concern even for the purity of the text.
A lot of the work done in trying to ascertain it, he felt, was
insignificant . 50 Although he believed it was “necessary and
imperative that ministers should acquire some knowledge of the
leading points involved in it”, he also believed that the subject was
“not one of very great practical importance, so far as concerns the
actual discovery of the mind and will of God from his word ”. 5 1

Cunningham fits least tidily into the thesis that the views of the
Free Church Fathers embody a kind of embryonic criticism. What
he shared with the critics was a conviction that every passage in the
Bible ought to be analysed with the utmost care; but he covered this
with an equally firm conviction that the results of such analysis
could not be inconsistent with “the general scheme of truth taught
in the Bible ”. 52 He was unequivocally opposed to criticism as he
understood it. He described it as carried on by German writers,
“some of whom have brought to this work a large amount of
learning, accompanied generally with a miserable lack of common
sense and sound logic ”. 5 3 And in what he labelled “the thorough
and daring infidelity of German rationalists”, he nearly
paraphrased the views for which George Adam Smith was
impeached less than sixty years later:

48 Cunningham, Lectures, 597.

49 Ibid., 545. „

50 He cited Griesbach’s Greek Testament. Although he believed it superior to the

Textus Receptus, he considered it overdone. Ibid., 549.

51 Ibid., 550.

52 Ibid., 596-597.

53 Cunningham, Lectures, 422.

132

“It is a favourite idea of the German rationalists, and is
another specimen of their infidelity, that the system of
doctrine which is contained in the Bible is capable of
progressive and indefinite improvement; that as it stands in
the Bible it is mixed up with many crude and ill-digested
notions, such as might be expected to proceed from men who
lived in a comparatively rude and uncultivated age, but that,
with the march of intellect and the progress of literature and
science, men may be expected to be better able to separate the
chaff from the wheat, to throw off what savours of an
uncultivated age and is traceable merely to local or temporary
influences, and to bring out fully from the Scriptures a system
of pure and rational Christianity”. 5 4
Cunningham’s lectures were delivered in 1843 but were not
published until 17 years after his death in 1861. Thomas Smith,
their editor, thought it necessary, therefore, to justify their issue in
the light of the changes in theology that had taken place in the
interval. “It is quite true that if Dr Cunningham had been alive
now, and had been writing on the same subjects”, Smith wrote in
the preface, “his manner of treating them would have been
somewhat different from that in which he treated them five-and-
thirty years ago”. 55 The justification, one senses, was partly an
expression of regret that the lectures were being published at all, a
regret that A. B. Bruce, though “with respect amounting to
veneration for an old teacher,” did not fail to express very frankly
indeed. 56

Smith’s comment is worth pondering nonetheless, especially in
regard to the debate over inspiration. Smith did not speculate on
how the Lectures might have been modified, but it is difficult to
imagine Cunningham’s view of Scripture being very much altered
by the scholarship of the thirty-five years between their delivery
and their publication. It seems more likely that had he lived
Cunningham would have been found as near the front of
traditionalist ranks in 1878 as he was in 1843. His is perhaps the
tightest defence of inspiration of any of the Free Church Fathers.

54 Ibid., 253. Compare this with, for instance, Smith’s statement to the Sub-
Committee of the College Committee of the United Free Church of Scotland,
Appendix II to the Special Report of the College Committee to the General
Assembly of 1902, pp. 10, 11.

55 Cunningham, Lectures, p. vii.

56 Whether this work should ever have been published may be a matter of
question, but certain it is, it should have been published long ago, or not at all.
We presume it owes its appearance to supposed bearings on present controversies
within the church of which the author was a distinguished ornament — a motive
for publication which the outside would have no concern, and which to many
within the pale may appear to degrade the work into the position of a
controversial pamphlet.” The British and Foreign Evangelical Review vol
xxviii. (London, 1878), 489-490.

133

Candlish and Cunningham defended the same rigid doctrine of
inspiration, but in different circumstances, by different means and
with different effects. Candlish wrote no treatise on inspiration.
His remarks on the subject were often first delivered in lectures to
non-theological audiences. He tended to be un-systematic. He
allowed himself the freedom to see each problem in its own
particularity, demanding its own solution. His solutions were
sometimes speculative, imaginative and tentative and his
definitions loose . 5 7 Where his argument was most winsome it was
often most ambiguous. Cunningham was much less ambiguous.
His Lectures were originally given to ministerial students and were
set therefore in a theological and apologetical context. He saw
every difficulty in relation to what he believed to be the Bible’s own
dogmatic system. While his argument was consistent it was not
always convincing, perhaps because it gave nothing away.

Bannerman: “Retreat”

It is interesting in this connection that Cunningham, on his
death bed, committed his lectures to James Bannerman, his
successor at one remove in the second chair of Apologetics at New
College , 5 8 whose views of Scripture, according to Drummond and
Bulloch, constitute “a cautious retreat from an untenable
position ”. 59 Bannerman, they claim, “had clearly dissociated
himself from the theory of verbal inspiration as stated at the
opening of New College, and had prepared the way for the full
employment of Biblical Criticism by Free Church scholars ”. 60

The doubts about Bannerman’s loyalty to the older view derive
primarily from his assertion that the doctrine of verbal inspiration
is only a theory, without, strictly speaking, biblical support. What
he said was this:

“Although instances can be pointed out in which it were
difficult to deny, in consistency with any fair system of
intepretation, that Scripture warrants the idea of verbal
revelation, yet it would be equally difficult to prove that in all

57 For instance, in the course of explaining what he understood by the term
inspiration, Candlish said, “it is of very little consequence whether you call this
verbal diction or not. It is equivalent to verbal dictation, as regards the reliance
which we may place on the discourse, or the document, that is the result of it”.
Reason and Revelation, 23.

58 Originally the second Divinity chair, then Apologetics, Christian Ethics, and
Pastoral Theology, now Christian Ethics and Practical Theology.

59 Drummond and Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843-1874, 263.
Bannerman (and James Buchanan to whom, along with Bannerman,
Cunningham had committed his manuscripts) did not live long enough or did not
think it feasible to publish the Lectures. In any case, the job fell, at Mrs
Cunningham’s request, to Smith.

60 Ibid., 264.

134

cases words were the medium of communication. In the
matter of inspiration (not revelation), the proof that it was
always carried on through the instrumentality of language is
still less decisive, and with respect to both, it would be to limit
the power of God in a manner both unwarranted and
presumptuous, to imagine or assert that He cannot employ
other instrumentality to effect the end in view ”. 6 1

Bannerman maintained that “the connection between human
thought and language is not of that invariable or essential kind to
justify us in saying that there can be no avenue to the mind except
through words, and no means by which its ideas may be guided to
the infallible expression of them except a verbal inspiration ”. 6 2
God may have sometimes revealed Himself in audible speech, to
the prophets for instance, but that the recording of that revelation
was verbally inspired cannot be proved. Had God chosen,
Bannerman argued, He could have used other means to effect His
communication and it might be different from what it is. To affirm
anything else is to limit God and to affirm too much. He concluded
in a less than dogmatic fashion: “Verbal inspiration, as the method
of the divine agency, is a doctrine which, if it cannot be affirmed to
be false, can as little be affirmed to be true. If it does not run
counter to anything found in Scripture, it is, we suspect, an
explanation of the mystery which Scripture does not demand ”. 63

Plainly Bannerman did not advocate the theory of verbal
inspiration. At least he did not advocate the theory that “human
language was the medium through which the Holy Spirit both
revealed truth to the prophet and impowered him to speak with
infallible accuracy ”. 64 He was very careful to distinguish between
revelation and inspiration. He could speak freely therefore about the
way he believed God had made Himself and His will known to men in
the first instance (revelation) and at the same time refuse to venture
any theory as to how that knowledge was transferred without error
to the sacred page in the second (inspiration). Some of his
colleagues were not as careful and so imply that the words God
suggested to the authors of Scripture in inspiring them were also the
means He used to reveal Himself to them. Thus Alexander Black,
first professor of New Testatment in New College: “It is by words
that we engage in the exercise of communion with God; it was by
words that God communicated the knowledge of His will to men in
the respective languages that He was pleased to employ for this

61 Bannerman, Inspiration, 247.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 248.

64 Bibliotheca Sacra was perceptive enough to see that the theory of verbal
inspiration that Bannerman rejected was the theory (re-)defined in this particular
way. Bibliotheca Sacra, vol., xxii, 352.

135

purpose ”. 65 Bannerman objected to the theory of verbal
inspiration on the ground that, though it may have been the least
ambiguous way of stating the Biblical doctrine of plenary
inspiration, it was also a description of the method of inspiration
which the Bible did not support . 66

Whether or not he had disassociated himself from the older
view is another matter. After all, it could be argued that Candlish’s
interpretation of the creation narrative also constitutes defection.
The differences between Bannerman and Cunningham, or between
Bannerman and Candlish or Candlish and Cunningham, should
not be seen as differences of opinion about the completeness or
importance of Scripture and its inspiration. On that they were
unanimous. Their real differences are of a subtler kind and show
up only as each worked out separately his own argument in
Scripture’s joint defence.

Both Cunningham and Bannerman, for example,
acknowledged the impropriety of declaring a priori that God could
make His will known to men only through divinely inspired
human language; but whereas Cunningham maintained that in fact
He does, Bannerman argued that He does not — not always
anyway. There is nothing above or beyond the words of Scripture
that conveys to us authentically or authoritatively the will of God
for our salvation, Cunningham proclaimed . 6 7 “The divine
certainty and the divine authority of the doctrine given by God”,
Bannerman declared to the contrary, “are no less infallible and
absolute when they speak to us through the thought, in whatever
way, truly presented to the mind, than when they speak through the
words which have been selected as the medium in the original text
for presenting it .” 6 8

On the related question of errors in Scripture there was a similar
harmony-disharmony. Bannerman and Cunningham agreed that
such errors as existed were errors in the copies and not in the
autographs, but they disagreed concerning the essential nature of
the problem involved and the best way of solving it . 6 9 Cunningham
saw it primarily as a matter of recovering the text in its primal
integrity. He believed that although we have no guarantee that the

65 Alexander Black, “The Exegetical Study of the Original Scriptures Considered
in Connexion with the Training of Theological Students”, in a letter to the Rev.
Thomas McCrie, Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1856),
7. See also Cunningham, Lectures, 343ff, especially perhaps p. 346.

66 But, as pointed out above p. 121, nearly all the protagonists disavowed any
attempt to describe how the Bible was inspired. It is his finer distinctions,
therefore, that separate Bannerman from his colleagues, not his views on the
main issue.

67 Cunningham, Lectures, 582.

68 Bannerman, Inspiration, 520.

69 Ibid., 5 1 3ff and Cunningham, Lectures, 525ff.

136

word of God has been kept pure in any one manuscript or printed
edition, nonetheless “God has preserved it in purity in his church,
and has given to men sufficient materials, in due use of ordinary
means, for obtaining a substantially accurate record of what he has
revealed ”. 70 All this emphasized the need for a careful, impartial,
and critical handling of Scripture . 71 Bannerman, on the other
hand, though never discounting the need for diligent scholarship or
mitigating the requirement for an inspired original, argued that
“those two elements of plenary inspiration in which its distinctive
character and importance consist — namely, infallible truth and
divine authority — are not tied to certain forms of language, and do
not exclusively reside in a mysterious selection of charmed
words ”. 7 2

The issue for Bannerman was less of language, original or
translated, than of the nature of divine-human intercourse. “The
thoughts of God in the revelation which He has granted”, he said,
“are not to be identified with the mere expressions in Hebrew or
Greek which convey them to our ears, as if they could not be
conveyed otherwise ”. 7 3

“Far beneath the surface of its language there is a well of
truth springing up into everlasting life; and it needs but that
we should draw from its depths, to learn that it is divine and
unfathomable. The letter of the Scripture page, even though
inspired by God, is not so deep as the mind of God that is
beneath it ”. 74

Given the differences between Cunningham and Bannerman on
the manner of God’s revelation, there could hardly have been
complete agreement between them on the intimately related matter
of understanding it. To Cunningham’s “the written word must be
at once our starting point and our goal”, Bannerman opposed,
“what is stated in the shape of formal affirmation is little,
compared with what is involved and implied in the words, without
being expressly affirmed ”. 75 Cunningham asserted that the
Scriptures have but one sense and that that one sense can be
discovered only by investigating the literal and grammatical
meaning of Scripture’s words exactly as they stand. Bannerman
urged that “to rest contented with the words of inspired men,
neglecting the fuller meaning beneath, or to require that, for every
truth we receive as God’s truth, we should show proof that it is set

70 perha^s 8 pp m 536 e 537 re5 ’ 5331 ^ a ' S ° ^ Wh ° le ° f Lecture xlii> in Particular

71 Ibid., 600-601.

72 Bannerman, Inspiration, 519.

73 Ibid . , 520.

74 Ibid., 583.

75 Ibid.

137

down expressly in so many terms in Scripture, is a practice
condemned by many instances in the word of God ”. 76

Much of this disagreement is explicable in the light of
Bannerman’s insistence that history is the primary method of
God’s disclosure. He referred to the sacred writers as “the
historians of revelation ” 7 7 and observed that “the lessons that
God has taught in His revelation were first written on the outward
pages of history, and only afterwards written in the words and with
the commentary and explanations of the Bible ”. 78 As with
Robertson Smith (Bible history is “the story of God’s saving self-
manifestation”), Christianity for Bannerman was “less a system of
spiritual truths presented in abstract form, than a series of facts
and examples exhibiting the manner in which God deals with the sin
that he hates, and provides for the recovery of the sinner whom He
pities ”. 79 Earlier on he had put it even more emphatically: “It is
God’s method to reveal Himself by facts rather than by
propositions; and ... in these supernatural events which have been
wrought on the earth, and recorded in the Bible, there is a spiritual
meaning as deep and true as is found even in the words ”. 80 In
Bannerman’s view the historicity of Scripture precedes the fact that
the Bible is inspired, rather than the other way around. “So
thoroughly is revelation identified with Bible history,” he claimed,
“that if the Bible be not historically true, it is a matter of no
consequence whether it be inspired or not .” 8 1

By his insistence on the essentially historical nature of God’s
revelation, Bannerman took a harder, more traditional line on
Genesis than did Candlish, whose commentary Drummond and
Bulloch think “highly conservative ”. 8 2 Candlish, as already
shown, held the creation account to be figurative, but Bannerman,
this time in full agreement with Cunningham, maintained that it is
historical and that its author, “the historian of Genesis”, got his
information from God . 83 To deny its authenticity, Bannerman

76 Ibid., 586.

77 Ibid., 101.

78 Ibid., 27.

79 Ibid. , 25. The degree to which Smith echoed Bannerman on this particular point
is remarkable: “The saving truth by believing which men are to become
Christians has the form of history. 1 am not to be saved by believing some eternal
truths about God. I must believe that my salvation is rendered possible only by
the work of Christ which took place historically and among men.” “Christianity
and the Supernatural” in Lectures and Essays of William Robertson Smith, edd.
J. S. Black and George Chrystal (London, 1912), 121.

80 Bannerman, Inspiration, 14.

81 Ibid., 31.

82 Drummond and Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland, 1843-1874, 255.

83 Bannerman, Inspiration, lb-11. “What reliance”, Cunningham asked, “could
be placed upon an account of the creation of the world, and the important
transactions connected with the origin of our race, by a man who lived 2,500
years after they had taken place, unless God had directed him?” Lectures, 299.

138

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argued, would be, implicitly, to deny the possibility of a
supernatural revelation.

To say that God has revealed Himself pre-eminently in history
is not necessarily to say that everything in the Bible that has the
appearance of history is in fact history or that everything that is
history is absolutely accurate in every detail; and there can be little
doubt that although Bannerman agreed with Robertson Smith on
the first he would have disagreed with him on both the other issues,
and on much else besides, as any reading of Smith would show.
What is important is that Bannerman agreed with Smith at all; and
what is ironical is that it is his view of the historical character of
God’s revelation, which generally separates him from
Cunningham, that on the particular question of Genesis, brings
him into agreement with Cunningham against Candlish whose
spirit he seems more to share.

Defending the doctrine of plenary inspiration was a much more
sophisticated operation than simply believing it, more mined with
complication and subtlety than even its staunchest proponents in
the middle of last century could have known. Notions of
considerable significance were exposed in the delicate task of
clarifying the position they were thought to defend. The problem of
defining the doctrine is a case in point. Verbal inspiration might
mean simply that the influence of God extends to the choice of the
actual words of Scripture; on the other hand it might also be taken
to mean that God communicates with men solely or primarily by
means of human language. If the latter meaning was understood
then Bannerrnan’s finer distinctions challenged, in the longer run,
not only the doctrine of verbal inspiration but the concept of
Christian belief which supported it and depended upon it. For
apprehending God in historical events, even if they are mediated
through a written account, is a different thing from comprehending
His will as He has expressed it in words, and the requirement for an
absolutely accurate text exactly interpreted is modified to the extent
that Christian belief is thought of as more like intuitive seeing or
perceiving than rational understanding.

The older position was not monolithic. Its essential character,
and the intention of its defenders, are clear, but the very variety of
the ways in which it was defended suggests that it was by no means
free from ambiguities and differences of opinion. Upon the
resolution of some of these ambiguities and differences, as the case
of Bannerman perhaps best illustrates, fairly important issues
hang.

Conclusion

If the various styles of Christian piety could be ordered on a
kind of graph or spectrum, with objective/rational at one end and

139

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subjective/experimental at the other, there can be little difficulty
deciding on which side of centre to plot mid-nineteenth century
Scottish Evangelicalism. The word Calvinism suggests theology
nearly as much as it does a particular type of theology, and
Cunningham’s pregnant phrase “the Calvinism of the Word of
God’’ characterizes a mood or an ethos as aptly as it does a system
or a method. 84 The tone is decidedly doctrinal and cognitive as
opposed to mystical and intuitive. 85

The study of church history, to Cunningham’s mind, was most
serviceable as an apologetic tool. In teaching it, he told the
Assembly of 1845, he intended, first, to “give an historical
exhibition of the various deviations which, in the course of eighteen
centuries, had occurred from the truth laid down in the Holy
Scriptures’’, and second, to “give a detailed view of the leading
controversies which from time to time have agitated men’s minds,
and which have exerted the greatest influence on belief and
doctrine’’. 8 6 According to Rainy, Cunningham’s pupil, successor
and biographer, the course bore the marks of Cunningham’s
intent: “The charm of historic detail was necessarily sacrificed; the
cross lights from human nature and experience faded away; the
course became severe, and depended wholly on one great interest as
its motive and justification”. 8 7 Cunningham’s method, Rainy
said, was not merely to narrate a series of historical events, or even
to explain how any one of them came to prominence: “It presses on
at once to the practical and ultimate question in which the
theologian is interested, viz., What is true?” 88

Cunningham’s failure to distinguish between history and
apologetics was due not so much to any confusion between them as
to a more fundamental conviction about what truth is and how it is

84 The history of the church, Cunningham claimed, shows that those who have held
defective views of inspiration have very often held erroneous views of the central
doctrines of Christianity. “There has generally been, though of course not
without occasional exceptions, a remarkable parallelism or analogy between the
soundness of men’s views upon the subject of inspiration and their general
orthodoxy, or the correctness of their sentiments upon the leading principles of
divine truth — a parallelism manifest through all the gradations of error, from
German Rationalism, which is infidelity, up through Socinianism, Pelagianism,
Arminianism, to truth, as exhibited in the Calvinism of the word of God”.
Lectures, 407.

85 This may be an important difference between Scottish and English
evangelicalism. The evangelical movement in England, according to John
Baillie, “had its own contribution to make towards the emergence of the
romantic temper in that country”. (The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought,
12 ).

86 As quoted in Robert Rainy, Life of William Cunningham (London, 1871),
226-227.

87 Ibid., 229.

88 Ibid. It should also be kept in mind that Cunningham came to Church History
from Apologetics.

140

arrived at. It was reported to Cunningham that his appointment to
the History post had been opposed by some on the ground that he
had no imagination. His response: “Don’t you think a want of
imagination is rather a good feature in a historian? K ' Truth,
historical or theological, was not the yield of imaginative but rather
of rational processes and church history was handmaid to
systematic theology. The same unspeculating insistence on
dogmatic certainty and consistency had earlier governed
Cunningham’s handling of Scripture and the doctrine of
inspiration. Severely technical as his method was, it was never fully
critical. It was not allowed to breach or even to test the boundaries
of his theological system . 90

Candlish encouraged more daring. “The advocates oi
inspiration — even of verbal inspiration — ” he declared in his
examination of F. D. Maurice’s Essays “have no objection
whatever to cast the Bible unreservedly into the crucible of
exegetical and antiquarian analysis; and they are not careful though
the result should be, along with the explanation of many old
puzzles, the raising of some new ones ”. 91 The defenders and
expounders of revelation will be listened to, he said elsewhere,
provided thoughtful men understand that they have no intention of
putting down inquiry by the mere assertion of authority or
imputation of heresy. “Let them see that we face the question in a
very different spirit”, he proclaimed, “that we have something of
the Baconian as well as the dogmatic mind in us .” 9 -’ But Candlish
may be the best illustration of the evils that beset those who
attempt, seriously and more or less fearlessly, to be open in
intellectually unsettled times. His appreciation of science, modified
by his aptitude for dogma, sometimes produced answers to
questions about inspiration that, rather than preclude further
inquiry, tend to invite it. As for imagination, it is precisely in
Candlish’s occasional reliance on it — often the most winsome
though not the most cogent sections of his argument — that he loses
his way and comes nearest the subjectivism he eschews but cannot
avoid.

Even the attempt to say no more on Scripture’s behalf than the
Scriptures themselves say was not without its complications. That

89 Ibid., 225.

90 To do him justice, Cunningham was never merely rational. Although his
approach to the Bible and Christian belief is almost always described in terms
that are more cerebral than those of the other protagonists, he insisted as much
as any of them that no effective knowledge of God’s word could be had without
the aid of the Holy Spirit and that the essential thing about any view of
inspiration is that it should lead those who hold it to submit themselves to
Scripture’s authority. See Lectures, 559 and 407-408.

91 Robert S. Candlish, Examination of Mr Maurice's Theological Essays (London,
1845), 386.

92 Christianity and Recent Speculations, p. vii.

141

Bannerman’s 588 pages should be considered both a defence of the
more rigid doctrine of inspiration and a preparation for higher
criticism is perhaps the evidence. No one could mistake the
intention of Bannerman’s book; not everyone was able to see its
implications. 9 3 And in Bannerman too, perhaps more than in
Candlish, there are sporadic outbreaks of the intuitive or
experiential, the activity of a kind of spiritual fifth column, never
to be completely subdued in even the most rationally inclined of
religious men and debate.

The encounter with what Candlish pejoratively referred to as
“theological science” drew out the doctrine of plenary inspiration,
stretched it and thinned it as it forced it to come to terms with itself,
thus exposing its weaknesses as well as demonstrating its strengths.
More precisely, it was perhaps not the doctrine but the defence of
the doctrine which was tested; and in the process the doctrine itself
was sometimes transmuted. Again Bannerman is the primary case
in point: he felt, apparently, that he had to jettison verbal
inspiration in order to save plenary inspiration, which meant giving
the traditional position a different character altogether. 9

There were only a few tactical options open to the
traditionalists. One was simply to repudiate the hostile forces, to
argue that the battle was pre-eminently spiritual, that the truth
could be seen only by the eye of faith and probably never
completely in this life. The other was to engage them, to contest
every issue on its own ground, answering blow for blow, and
sometimes allowing one’s position to be vulnerable or even
modifiable in order to secure its defence. The traditionalists took
both options. Their spirituality required that they take the first,
their rationality required that they take the second. But insofar as
they took the second they admitted that criticism was with them, it
only as an evil to be checked. In other words they joined the battle.
Perhaps neither their faith not their theology would allow them to
do otherwise. But the defence of the doctrine of inspiration itself
proved to be a double-edged sword. Believing may have fostered
believing criticism.

93 The Christian Treasury welcomed it as “a standard work capable of res ' stl "?
combined attack which infidelity and scepticism may hurl against the divine
inspiration of the Scriptures”, and The British and Foreign

claimed that it “contains incomparably the most systematic and complet
discussion of the great question of the inspiration of Holy Scripture which h

vet been presented to the Christian Church • ,

94 “And this indeed, is the peculiar character of the doctrine, that you cannot
diminish or qualifi bin you reverse it.” Coleridge. Aids ,o Rt/leco* snd t he
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 318.